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Who: Aerith & Sephiroth
When: Early June
Where: Aefenglom
What: Berry Picking
Warnings: None yet! No one will die, which considering the characters, is a miracle.

[It's a distraction, truth be told. The coin will be useful: for more books, to help with the cost of things around the house. But she isn't doing it for that, not really, and gradually as the effect of the berries begins to take hold, she loses track of why she's doing it in the first place.

It's a distraction, she recalls, vaguely, from being unreasonably sad about someone not being here, when he wasn't supposed to be here in the first place. She shouldn't be upset about it, but she is, and so she's taken up an excessive amount of odd jobs in the meantime. This one isn't much different from flower-picking, and she moves to stand (unsteadily, slowly), having plucked what she can from this bush, when a shadow falls over her.

She squints up, forcing her vision to adjust, and does not look surprised at Sephiroth's presence. Not frightened. Merely pensive.]

Odd place for you to be.

[The words do not slur, but they are spoken with a strange, careful sort of slowness, like she's working out what she wants to say and hasn't finished thinking on it before she says it.] Have you come to help?

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[They both have reasons to inundate their hours with odd jobs and tasks to keep time marching forward. Sephiroth, especially, feels the weight of lassitude pressing into him. Having so many from Gaia appear, only to have them slip away as though they were nothing, has jarred him in ways that he’d not readily admit to. Even those he did not care to see — the (Vice) President himself, his loyal guard dogs — were a sight that reminded him of his Planet, and all that had been left behind.

That, recently coupled with an overbearing truth that singes every measure of thought crossing his mind as of late, Sephiroth finds that he hates when his hands are idle. They must be busy, they must be doing; whether it is leaving endless score marks against the poor training dummies behind the Barracks, or accepting mundane jobs at random, it didn’t matter. Anything was better than that dread sensation of allowing his mind to move in endless circles, even if that anything is picking berries in high demand, neglectful of the effect each clutch of leaves impresses on his mind.

It’ll pass, as everything always does. His body viciously defends itself from foreign influence by default, but even that will take time. Time enough to allow him to find Aerith, of all people, next to a particularly vibrant cluster of berries literally ripe for the picking. Time enough for him to cast his shadow over her, to cant his head and look upon her with eyes that are a little more searching than normal, their sharpness dulled by something oddly imprecise in their intensity. His silhouette, too, is different than what she’ll last remember — if only for the two large wings pressed obediently against his back, masses of dark feathers.]

I’ve come to pass the time.

[Certainly not a lie. Though if he’s already knee-deep in berry picking, there’s no proof of it. Has he left his basket at the previous bushel, distracted by a familiar face as he made his way over? It’s hard to say, but it’s possible. (He did.)]

You don’t want the company? Even if I have questions for you?

[A feather, black as ink, flutters downward in a lazy spinning arc to land between them. Aerith's eyes fix on it, hard, and something like apprehension cuts through the heavy dullness settling over her mind like dense fog. Her fingers are clumsy, wine-drunk, though this is hard to tell when she picks up the feather, pinned between her thumb and forefinger. She twirls it lazily about.

That he has questions for her is unsurprising, from what Cloud has told her. She doesn't answer right away, her gaze fixed on the glossy feather captured in her fingertips. Eventually, however, the words come, delivered in that same slow drawl, the chipper brightness that usually permeated her tone whittled down to nothing. She seems older, this way.]

It depends on the question.

[She looks up at him, finally, her eyes somber.] Cloud told me, you know. What Tifa told you. I suppose you're going to ask about that. I'm afraid they know the story better than I do.

[The feather is long and glossy, with dark, patterned striations. It is strange to watch Aerith work it between her fingers, as though she's casually worrying at a piece of himself. The timing of his wings' apperance is almost comically apt after what he had learned about Nibelheim from Cloud, what he learned about himself. He cannot quite disconnect the imagery from those same appendages that would sprout from his old friends' back, even if they are not the same in this world. Even if he’s burdened with two, and not one.

As far as he's aware.]

I don't need to know the details. [He corrects her, his tone cold as it often is, but there's a hint of something guttering beneath the surface. Something that's always been there, more easily slipping through the cracks on this berry-outing day.] I've already been told them. Shown parts of that day, through the memory of a shared Bond.

[His cat's eyes fix on her when she draws her own gaze up to him. Many statements and questions crowd themselves on his tongue, but he hems them all away save for one.]

But you're ahead of everyone else here. [Her timeline stretches further.] How much did you already know? Not about Nibelheim — about me.

[The unnatural slit of his pupils troubles her to stare at for too long, the mako glow of his eyes boring holes into her. Listlessly, she continues to twirl the feather, and something like grief crosses over the soft placidness of her face.

Were it not for the berries, the unusual and heady scent of them, she might hold her tongue. But even without this, it has never settled easily with her, to keep secrets of this magnitude. It has always been a burden. Being thrown, unbidden, into this world didn't change that.]

I know all of it. Some of the dangers, the Planet told me. And some I saw for myself. [And still others were enacted upon her.] You — that version of you — razed the village of Nibelheim, and when you came back, you wanted to destroy everything. The entire Planet. You almost did, too.

... Why do you want to know this? [this is said all of a sudden, harried and frustrated.] It's a terrible story.

[A version of him. The distinction is clear, and it’s similar to the point Cloud had tried so hard to drive home. A variation of himself, whose mind splintered under a misguided truth, is not the same as the one who stands before her now. A small mercy, a faint glimmer of hope that things might not remain the same for him — that fate is not etched in stone, should they return.

Comfort, maybe, on another day. But Sephiroth does not seek comfort, raw as the news remains, like a healing wound he can’t quite stop picking at. It isn’t surprising that he still asks questions, still seeks them from her even after learning of a dread future that makes his stomach turn. Even as she hints at an even more violent one, an all-encompassing, almost-destruction of the Planet itself. One more stifling revelation to add to the pile.

He does it to himself; just like he might in the future, days and days sequestered in a manor’s library, splintering his mind with every book opened, read. Sephiroth seeks the truth even if it shears him in half. Obsession becomes more prevalent after his fall, but it still sleeps quietly now, even under the bulwark of sanity.

This makes her question frustrating to him. Incomprehensible.]

Why wouldn’t I want to know it? Wouldn’t you?

[He shakes his head, but through his own willpower, the world doesn’t quite tilt.]

Why wouldn’t you have told me earlier? You know what it’s like to live in a lab. To have information taken from you but never given. [The berry plants turn his words into sweeping generalities, but he knows, deeply, that she would understand his meaning. That cyclical dehumanization, so prevalent that it became mundane. Normal.] I’m tired of being fed lies.

[Mention of the laboratories makes her look up at him, sharply, forgetting herself, the careful omission she's engaged in for months. That's not fair, she wants to say, and it is only the knowledge that he'll dismiss it as childish that keeps her from saying it. The effect of the berries further loosens her tongue, and what she blurts out is the unedited truth.]

I was afraid. Afraid of what you'd do. Do you blame me? The last time, you almost destroyed a world. You hurt so many people. I didn't want that to happen here.

[Her ire seems to fade some, after this, or at least retreat beneath the surface.] I don't know if I would want to. Knowing the future has never made me feel any better. It's only made me more alone.

[When she rubs at her bare arm, she leaves remnants of the berries, a streak dark as blood against her skin. She shakes her head, as if to clear it, but the fog there remains.] The only way I've ever known you is as something dangerous. Someone who needed to be stopped. There was no way of knowing that wouldn't happen again.

[She says that she had been afraid of him, and this should be nothing new to his ears. Sephiroth is used to casting a shade of intimidation over others back home without even trying, instilling tension in infantrymen’s shoulders simply by walking by. But Aerith speaks of a different kind of fear, and he can comprehend the degree of it in her tone now stripped bare of consideration. The sort that matched the measure of a man who almost destroyed a world, hurt so many people. A killer, a monster in a way that was far beyond the form his body was taking on this planet.

And he, too, thinks it’s hardly fair. That he has not yet wrought any of those atrocities by his own hands — the burning of a village; the destruction of his own Planet? — but the pall of judgment hangs over his head regardless. Is everyone so certain of his abhorrent nature that they would rather keep the truth far from him? Did they have no faith that he would handle the revelations better when offered to him kindly, carefully? He is not that desperately weak, so unsteady that his mind would fall to pieces over and over and over, no matter the circumstances— is he?

For all the questions bruising the inside of his head, only one rises to the forefront.]

And now?

[Now, his mind is weighted with knowledge of Nibelheim and Jenova, yet still burdened with the need to know more. To share in the same one she carries.]

Are you still afraid?

[Was she? He hadn't hurt anyone here, at least that she knows. Their temporary Bond had revealed information, but nothing that hinted at the madness that would destroy him later on. But she thinks of his Bond with Cloud, and sometimes she wonders. If it was simply the path of least resistance, or the fruit of Hojo's experiment. Sephiroth's will imposing itself on him, without either of them realizing it.

It makes her think of the bruising pressure of hands on her in the cavern left in place of the Forgotten Temple, a sword raised over her head, the Black Materia being passed from one hand to another. It makes her feel guilty to have these thoughts, but it doesn't stop her from thinking them.]

Yes.

[She says, after a delay. She sounds very sad to admit it.] I am. I'm afraid for Cloud, too. Did he tell you everything about Hojo's experiments?

[It isn’t an admission he knows how to feel about, especially through the haze of clouded lucidity. Irritation, indignation. Resignation, deep discontent. And maybe it doesn’t matter, because that fear is sincere and present and extends to those he knows in this world.

That name twists unpleasantly in his chest, having piled one more offense against it — knowing that Hojo’s experimentations were far more invasive than he ever gave him credit for. A frown grows prevalent on his features.]

He told me about Jenova, about the nature of my birth. I assume Hojo had a hand in all of it.

[What facet of the science division did that man not have his clawing fingers in?]

Cloud said that he had been experimented on, too.

Yeah. He and Zack were kept in the basement of the Shinra mansion, for years. I can't say for sure all that happened, but from what I know of Hojo... I know it must have been awful.

[A shadow crosses over her face.]

The Cetra... my mother, referred to Jenova as the crisis from the skies. It infected the Cetra by imitating loved ones. Its "memetic legacy." Hojo wanted to recreate that. He called it the Reunion. He injected people in Nibelheim with Jenova cells, showered them with mako, just like making SOLDIERs, right? But they weren't like you and Zack. Most people can't withstand that sort of thing. They lost their sense of self. All that mattered was returning to the host body, Jenova. And to you.

That's the experiment that was done on Cloud. That's why...

[She shakes her head.] It's why I'm worried. Sometimes I'm not sure if what he's doing is all himself. That isn't his fault, and it isn't yours, either. I don't think you want to hurt anyone here. But I can't help but worry.

[She takes a shaky breath, wonders where all of this is coming from.] I can't make up for not telling you before, but I can try to explain what I know now. Do you want to sit down?

[Cloud and Zack, the realization overcoming him like a storm. He recalls, with a clarity uncharacteristic of a wine-heavy mind, his conversation with the other man before he had disappeared from this world like a ghost, and wonders the same of him — why hadn’t he said anything?

But then he recalls the way he had looked at him, the freezing flash of fear when Sephiroth had brandished Masamune at a Shade, and the pieces of the story slot into place again. He feels addled, suddenly, and not only by the leaves of the berries. One by one, the truth slides needles into his brain, to the point where it seems as though they are talking about someone else. Another man who shares his name, a story penned by an author with a penchant for tragedy.

Surreal. Sometimes still unbelievable. Perhaps a weak defense mechanism, tossed up for his own sake, to feel this way. He listens, and then he almost scoffs humorously at her question. It seems like such an innocuous thing, to sit and discuss this like it were fond tale to recite outdoors, beneath the sun.]

What does it matter?

[Said stubbornly regarding taking a seat, though given the unsteady nature of both body and conversation, maybe it wouldn’t be unwise to sit.]

You think I’m influencing him? Controlling him? [Would that explain that strange connection, felt at the cellular level, but easily explained away by the Bond? Intrinsically, maybe he already knows. ] Everything he does on this planet is of his own accord. I know it; I can feel it through our Bond.

[Why is this such a poignant concern, beyond the obvious? Unless—]

You’re worried because it’s happened to him before. Hasn’t it?

Because it's a difficult conversation. [She sounds weary.] You may not act like it, but this has to be affecting you. I don't care how stoic you are.

[For now she allows him to remain standing, though this line of questioning makes her gaze cant away, and she wishes she had something to do with her hands in the wake of it. They settle in her lap instead.]

Yes. It happened during our journey together, and afterward too. He could hear you, I think — guiding him, telling him where to go to complete tasks for you.

[And now came the beginning of one of the worst parts of this story, she thinks.] When we started to travel outside of Midgar, people claimed to see you places, so at first I thought it was only that. But then we went to an old temple of the Cetra, where something you wanted was inside. It was called the Black Materia. It's a very old magic, a terrible one. It could summon something called Meteor, which would cause a wound in the Planet, one too great for humanity to survive it.

The Cetra there spoke to me, through the Planet, and told me how to retrieve the Black Materia. But when we did...

[Her hands tense.]

Cloud attacked me. [In a rush now, as if trying to explain herself, lest she be doubted:] I know it wasn't him. It wasn't his fault; he didn't know what he was doing.

[Her voice has dropped some. She had not ever discussed this with anyone. Not the others, not Zack while he was here, certainly not Cloud. Only said that she'd never blamed him, and that was true. But she had been afraid then, afraid of him for the first time, and that was true too. If the others had not intervened...]

The others had to pull him off of me. And then I understood.

[ You may not act like it, but this has to be affecting you.

A statement that has him straightening his back as though to contradict her, a bullheaded display to show that he’s as unyielding as before, that his stoicism is a proper shield that keeps his spine straight and repels the scrutiny of others. Of her insight, which is poignantly and so very correct.

Every statement seems to be a new revelation that he has no context for, beyond stringing together the story hurriedly in his own mind. Black Materia, Meteor— a connection to the almost-destruction of their Planet, no doubt. That hatred he saw in the fires of Nibelheim, having spread to a global scale. How can he house that kind of dread motivation? If what she says is true, is it not quietly sleeping in him now, waiting for the moment to be set free?

Maybe she was right to be scared.

When Sephiroth pulls himself back to reality, trailed along by her explanation, he’s realized that he’s pressing the heel of a palm against his head. Not as steady as he thought.]

I—

[His focus is stretched too thin, and perhaps after all this time, he cannot quite blame only the plants and their leaves.]

I haven’t done that to him. Not here.

[He shakes his head, silver swaying.]

It’s like you’re speaking about someone else. You don’t know what this is like— to accept that is the kind of monster I am. Do you understand? I can’t.

[For a time, Aerith doesn't respond. She studies him, quiet and somber, and takes in what he says, and what he doesn't say. He doesn't look well, despite his stubbornness, the clipped control in his tone, and she feels that worry again, eating at her.

She doesn't let it overtake her. Fear and worry had never been enough to stop her before, and she wouldn't let it stop her now. If they had a Bond... the idea of it, even knowing he was not the man he would become, it makes her balk. But it would be easier, if she had it now, to allow her emotions to fall as a cloak over his own, soothing them. It would make her more confident in what she was doing, the things she was saying.

It's the truth, is all she knows. She can only hope that's enough, for now.]

No, I don't know what that's like. But I do know what it feels like, to be angry. To feel like you're different, like you don't belong anywhere. To be alone. I know what those kinds of feelings do, if you let them fester.

You're not a monster, Sephiroth. [She sounds so sad.] You don't have to accept that. You've been given a chance to change it. No one's ever given you a chance before, that's all. What Cloud told you, what I'm telling you now... it's just one future. That doesn't mean it's the only one.

[It’s once more similar to what Cloud had told him, barely even couched in differing rhetoric. And it should provide more comfort than what it does, if not for Aerith being correct on all other accounts — the endless sense of being different, and being alone, and the rest of this ugliness that had long crystallized at his core, cannot be swept away with a handful of reassurances. He only knows how to keep it all locked inside, to let it sit and weigh and fester, as she said. The reason Sephiroth allows anything to slip through now is due to extenuating circumstances; both his affected mind and a subject too cumbersome to know how to truly process.

But as he looks at her, pale brow pinching above searching eyes, perhaps her words are just enough to win the smallest of acquiescences, dulling the hardest edges of his uncertainties.]

You’re so certain that the future isn’t already written. Even though you and Cloud have already lived it.

[Hasn’t it gained permanence through that alone? He wonders if the future is as malleable as they make it sound.

With that, a full accedence seems to overcome him, and Sephiroth takes that once-offered seat — the berry-drunkness has him sinking low to his knees, pressed into the blades of grass beneath him. His wings are so long that his flight feathers protest and splay across the ground.]

And if we return to Gaia and nothing changes?

I'm not certain of anything. Not anymore. [she admits.] If nothing changes, then...

[She watches him settle, the feathers strange and too-dark against the grass.] Then nothing changes.

[She allows this to hang in the air for a moment, and then speaks up again.] But what if something does? That's a future even I haven't seen yet. None of us were supposed to meet this way, and we did. I can't believe that was all for nothing.

[How strange, to be having this conversation with her murderer. She supposes it's been a long time coming, and hating him for that seems so ultimately pointless. For Cloud and Tifa, and all the others, but for her... what she feels is hard to define. She doesn't feel pity, either, but seeing him like this, she can't help but feel something. That intrinsic human connection — the recognizing of your pain in someone else, if only in bits and pieces. Human's a funny term to use. But that was what they were, wasn't it? No matter how much Hojo tried to prove otherwise.]

How do you feel? What will you do, if you go back and remember this?

[The world feels a little steadier this much closer to the ground, even though the green things all around him seem to shudder beneath his weight — fitting, likely, for the alien strands of DNA woven into his own, though Sephiroth is spared that cruel thought thanks to his hazy cognizance.

He cannot say that she is right, nor wrong. Has the flow of time stalled so much during their time here that it cannot continue as normal, should they return? Or is destiny set, unwavering, and this only a temporary departure from what is guaranteed to happen? No one knows — and he can spin that as a comfort, or hang himself up on the what-ifs until they suffocate him. But in the end, none of them can say for certain.

But if things did change— if there was a chance—]

I was already planning on leaving SOLDIER. That won’t change. But Shinra should be held accountable for all it’s done.

[His eyes lift to hers, inscrutably cold but oddly assailed, all the same.]

Will you tell me what happened after Nibelheim? I was supposed to have died.

[But quite obviously, he didn’t.]

[Shinra should be held accountable, he says, and she feels a flutter of relief at it. Just Shinra. Not the Planet, not everyone on it. It's a response that is logical, despite the confusion and grief he must be feeling. It was a good sign. She's still cautious though, ruminating over what to say and how to say it.]

The official story was that you'd died while on the mission. The truth is that Cloud confronted you in Nibelheim's mako reactor. I'm not sure how he managed it, but he overpowered you, and you were thrown into the Lifestream.

Usually, when someone returns to the Planet, they become a part of its life cycle. Their individual consciousness... it disappears. But you managed to retain your consciousness, and traveled through the Lifestream until your... Reunion. What was left of your body was encased at the farthest reaches of the Planet, the Northern Crater, where Jenova once fell from the sky. When you had the Black Materia, you summoned Meteor. And if Meteor were to fall, it would create a wound in the Planet so great that Lifestream would gather there, and your body would absorb it. But the Planet, and everything on it...

[She trails off to look up at him, her expression pained.]

I told you it was a terrible story.

[She doesn’t need to explain the rest. There is only one outcome that would fit that description, a terrible magic called Meteor to come crashing down on the Planet. A wound large enough for the world’s lifeblood to churn at the surface of it, a place where a man lost to madness would undoubtedly view as a source of endless power.

He had been lost in the Lifestream, she says. So it was a death, in a way, because he cannot imagine a mortal body surviving that transition — to hear that he still would possess even a fragment of his cognizance would be a surprise were this not, indeed, a terrible story to hear.]

At the Gold Saucer—

[That too-bright memory, neon and lurid and noisy.]

—when you said you were on a mission to save the world, you had meant it literally.

[Dawning realizations, becoming more vivid through the heavy haze.]

Yeah. [Listlessly, she plucks at the blades of grass beneath her, a motion without any thought given behind it.] We were trying to figure out where you were going. To cut you off at the pass, and to stop Shinra too. That was the idea. Sometimes we did. Sometimes, [She thinks not of the aftermath of her death, that immediate fallout, the grief inlaid there. Instead she thinks of Mideel, of WEAPON. Cloud shattered all to pieces.] we didn't.

[She reaches up to her ribbon, and carefully undoes the knot there. From it, something comes loose, and she catches it in her palms to show to him.

It's Materia, pearlescent white and shimmering, like no other Materia in the world.] It wasn't all hopeless, though. There's always a way out. That's what my mother taught me.

This is White Materia. Here and now, it's good for absolutely nothing. I keep it all the same.

[Maybe it’s detrimental to wonder at what lies in-between the words of that phrase— the sometimes we didn’t. If there’s more ugliness to unearth as Aerith smooths them over; an endless spool of violence that his future-self left for them to trail after, what the shape of it might be. The story behind it. Still so many details he doesn’t know.

It’s a kindness, then, that she reaches up to undo the ribbon in her hair, allowing something white to slip loose, something else to fix his attention on. It glistens brightly as she shows it to him in gently cupped hands, as though proffering something uniquely precious.

It’s materia unlike any he’s seen before; it lives up to its name, but it’s more than just that — different, in an incalculable way, than his own assortment of materia he keeps from home. But according to her, just as useless.

Here, at least. The distinction is obvious.]

But if it did work?

[Black Materia. White Materia. The parallels are being drawn up in his mind, long before the question properly leaves his tongue.]

If it worked...

[She turns the orb over in her hands, watching as its surface catches sunlight, creating a pale prism of color. It's warm, though whatever magic it did have is well and truly locked away.

Black and white. Light and dark. She's sure he's already drawn his own conclusions, though she answers him anyway.] It would cast a spell called Holy. A shield over the Planet, the counterpart to Meteor. Cleansing light.

[But not without great sacrifice.]

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